Review 'American Fiction': Jeffrey Wright should be on his way to an Oscar nomination

By Peter Travers

Alive with fresh comic thinking, "American Fiction," now in theaters, hammers a stake into the toxic heart of Black stereotyping and laces every smile with a sting. This debut feature from writer-director Cord Jefferson introduces a filmmaker who never lets anger eclipse his humanism, though it's a close call.

Kudos to Jeffrey Wright, an acting giant who should be on his way to his first Oscar nomination as Thelonious Ellison -- everyone calls him Monk, after the jazz icon. But this Monk is no icon. His novels earn decent reviews but no money. To support himself, he teaches at a California college and complains when bookstores ghettoize his work in the African American section.

Monk is no fun. His rants end in a forced leave of absence that leaves him broke and crawling home to Boston, where his mother (Leslie Uggams) suffers dementia, and his gynecologist sister (Tracee Ellis Ross, turning a cameo into a tour de force) berates him for not giving a damn.

Claire Folger/Orion Pictures

Tracee Ellis Ross, as Lisa, and Leslie Uggams as her mother Agnes, in a scene from "American Fiction."

She's not wrong. Monk's plastic surgeon brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) is raking in cash in Arizona, but his finances are complicated by divorce, child support and the fact that he's just come out as gay. Brown's hilarious and heartbreaking performance cuts deep.

Monk, now his family's caretaker in chief, is in crisis. What to do? He can write a novel that trucks in demeaning images of Blacks as violent, trash-talking, gun-wielding junkies found in the bestselling "We's Lives in Da Ghetto" by Sinatra Golden, wickedly skewered by Issa Rae.

Monk's agent (John Ortiz) is appalled that his client, always the first to rail against Black trauma porn that "flattens our lives," is willing to compromise to flatter the worst instincts of white and Black readers. Jefferson reveals sharp satiric teeth in the scenes where Black characters spring to life and talk back to Monk while he writes "My Pafology," his parody of the thug life.

It's no joke when "My Pafology" hits paydirt. A million-dollar advance pays for mom's nursing home, so Monk capitulates with a few conditions. He'll use a pseudonym (Stagg R. Leigh), change his book's title to a four-letter word and pretend he's a gangsta on the run to avoid personal appearances.

Then Hollywood calls in the person of a Tarantino-like director (Adam Brody), whose latest hit tackles slavery under the title "Plantation Annihilation." You get the picture, leaving Monk wondering how far his complicity with exploitation will take him. Answer: No limits.

Claire Folger/Orion Pictures

Erika Alexander, as Coraline, and Jeffrey Wright, as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, in a scene from "American Fiction."

Jefferson, who won a writing Emmy for HBO's "Watchmen," uses his own experience in carving "American Fiction" out of "Erasure," a 2001 novel by Percival Everett. Like Spike Lee's bracing takedown of the minstrel-show mentality in 2000's "Bamboozled," Jefferson is having a blast biting the Hollywood hand that feeds him.

You can also feel a nurturing tenderness emerge in Monk's relationship with a neighbor, the refreshingly honest Coraline (Erika Alexander, wonderful). It's telling that Monk hides his secret identity from her, mostly out of shame, a fear of losing her and maybe facing himself.

Jefferson has a rare gift to lampoon hypocrisy without losing the human touch. There's fireworks when the two collide, as they do when Monk agrees to be a judge at a literary festival and finds his own book competing. His insults about himself fall on deaf ears from the white judges.

You may laugh out loud at an ending that no one can honestly call happy. Jefferson knows the world is too messed up for that. But he gleefully sticks it to every target, himself and us included. Even when his slashingly funny take on culture wars veers off course, it's still the best and boldest American comedy in years. You won't look at race on screen in the same way again.